Saturday, April 14, 2012

DROP THE TWINKIE AND WADDLE OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!!!

Cremations in Germany are becoming more complicated owing to an increase in obesity. At the moment, around half of the country's deceased are cremated. Likewise, roughly 15 percent of Germans are obese, and the figures are climbing.

The funeral industry has adapted to these new conditions with plus-size coffins and crematorium furnaces outfitted with larger doors. But one problem remains: Due to their high fat content, obese bodies often burn so hot that they overtax crematorium facilities. The cause of the chimney fire in Hamelin appears to have been "extreme heat due to burning a high amount of fat," according to Carl Schmidt, the crematorium's manager.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "Its a gas-fired oven. How can that go on fire?" Well, its the chimney that actually goes on fire because of all the scrubbers and particle filters and cyclonic screening and blah blah blah that they have on there. You dump a four hundred pound fattie in there, that's a whole lot of high density fuel getting burnt. The fat boils, becomes an aerosol, sticks in all the sooper-dooper filtering gizmology and GOES ON FIRE. Now you've got an unsealed chimney with a couple tons of half molten scrap on your nice clean crematorium floor. Bummer!

"Unforeseen fires happen at many crematoriums," says Jochen Sembdner, who constructs such facilities and conducts safety checks on them in the state of Lower Saxony. In such emergency situations, flaps behind the furnace open and the system goes into what's known as bypass mode. The furnace releases smoke -- together with all its dioxins and furans, mercury from dental fillings and other heavy metals and particulate matter -- directly into the outside air, bypassing the facility's gauges and filters. Crematorium operators say that the bypass mode is only used once or twice a year at any given crematorium. But that's not something that authorities check on."

Yeah, so basically anytime they get another sea-mammal to burn they bypass the super expensive scrubbing crap and blow the stinky fumacious smoke straight out. AAAAIIIEEEE! The humanity!!! They're bypassing the regulations!!! What to do, what to do?

Oh wait, I know! MORE regulations.

Engineer Hubert Kerber is spearheading the protest against a new crematorium in Sinsheim-Reihen, a town in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. Kerber says facilities in bypass mode "spew pollutants." As an inspector with TÜV, a German safety-certification and technical inspection organization, Kerber has a chance to see many types of incinerators, including crematoriums. Having compared standards and maximum permissible limits, he believes that "every waste-incineration operation is more strictly regulated."

A protest. That's sure to work.

However, if I may be allowed a modest proposal, perhaps the best way to look at this is as an opportunity rather than a problem. It seems in these times of expensive fuel to be a shame to merely waste all that fat which deceased citizens spent so much time and money toward accumulating and carrying around. If bodies were processed before cremation to make them more amenable to combustion, say by rendering out the fats or perhaps liquification by the use of a giant blender, the discarded shells of our departed loved ones could contribute one last gift to society by generating electricity in a co-located crematorium/power plant. Also, as we know fat has a higher energy content by weight than fossil fuels, so perhaps that last donation could be to a biofuels plant, and used to drive the hearse carrying the next sea mammal to the funeral home/rendering plant.

As society gains mass over the years the answer to our energy woes may be sagging in the next booth over at McDonald's, or bear-walking down the food court at the mall.